Third party candidate Jill Stein was a surprising addition this week to investigators casting an increasingly wide net in the congressional probe into Russian interference in the presidential campaign.

President Trump took to one of his favorite communication tools again on Saturday in a vociferous storm of tweets that seemed to make clear his new communication staff will not be tamping down his use of Twitter.

In other updates, I relocated this month back to Washington, D.C. where I will be an editor at The Hill newspaper. I shared my thoughts on returning and the 2017 White House Correspondents Dinner over at Medium.

“This should be required, for life,” the woman next to me declared to the rest of the locker room.
I went to a hot springs for New Year’s Eve. It wasn’t easy to get there, and it wasn’t a cheap overnight trip, but I did it because the week around New Years has been difficult for me the last two years. I needed to be somewhere new doing something I enjoyed.

That is a revolutionary statement for an unmarried woman raised in evangelical churches at the height of “purity culture,” when the definitive book for teens to read was Josh Harris’s “I Kissed Dating Goodbye.” I’ve had sex, and I’m not married, and I am not ashamed.

To prepare for a sprint triathlon last year, I got a coach, signed up for a gym with a pool and threw myself into training. It became a daily framework and began to overlap with the rest of my life. Swimming was my weakest sport. I wasn’t about to drown, but six months before my race, I was still just flailing around.

If you’ve never tried it, this week is the perfect time to taste and explore genever, a malted, juniper-forward, neutral grain-based spirit known as “the granddaddy of gin,” or sometimes as Holland or Dutch gin. Avanti Food & Beverage, Guard and Grace, Mister Tuna, Williams & Graham, the Way Back, and the Terminal Bar in Union Station are all offering special genever-based cocktails December 12 through 16.

Could there be anything better than the profusion of pies at Thanksgiving? We’re glad you asked, because it turns out that craft brews and pie can be symbiotic dessert partners: Beer has residual sugars that often pair better with seasonal slices than most wines. “In pie and beer pairings, take into account three things: harmonies, flavor elements, and intensity,” says Julia Herz, craft beer program director at the Boulder-based Brewers Association. What does all that mean? Similar flavors in the pie and beer result in harmony. Fruit or floral notes in an IPA would work well with a fruit pie; a nutty brown ale would pair best with a nut or spice pie. Flavor elements are factors of taste that include aroma and mouthfeel. Intensity means the richness of the pie and the alcohol content in the beer.

The plastic containers of meals, such as steak frites and coconut-poached fish with bok choy fried rice, are piling up in my fridge, and they are a little too fancy to pack for work lunches, where they would suffer the fate of the microwave.

Oscar-nominated writer/director Damien Chazelle set out to make a genre film with La La Land. Inspired by classic song-and-dance movies such as Singin’ in the Rain and Swing Time, he wanted to create an old-fashioned musical but “keep it grounded” in realism and contemporary Los Angeles.

Oscar-nominated production designer Patrice Vermette was tasked with creating an alien language for the new movie Arrival — and although he started by studying the languages used in other films about alien invasion, he ended up “reverse engineering” the language that Amy Adams uses to communicate with the invaders in the new film (in theaters Nov. 10). Vermette took a feelings-first approach to crafting the alien language by thinking about what it said to the audience without words.

Disney is in on the joke about “princess movies” in the new animated feature Moana (in theaters Nov. 23). In the film, a road trip by sea in which a young Polynesian woman named Moana leaves her island home to find the demi-god Maui and return a lost object to its right home, there is more than one joke about the title character’s princess credentials.

The first time in my life I’ve held a shotgun is also the first time I’ve hunted. On a cold and clear morning in November, I joined thirteen other women for a Women Afield pheasant hunt organized by Colorado Parks and Wildlife.

For five minutes late on a Friday afternoon, I was completely lost somewhere in the Pacific Northwest. I could not see or hear my friend Ruth, who should have been just behind me on the other side of the ridge. Or the ridge before that. I had crossed a lot of such ridges, thinking I would catch sight of the lake just over the next one.

With all the new construction in Denver, it’s easy to forget that Coloradans find value in old things, too. There’s no better time to remember than this month, which marks the 50th anniversary of the National Historic Preservation Act and the creation of the National Register of Historic Places. (Locations designated as historic places are eligible for preservation grants and tax credits.) The register lists notable sites such as Pikes Peak and the Stanley Hotel plus many lesser-known—and thus, less crowded—landmarks worth a visit. We’ve sifted through more than 1,500 Colorado properties and districts and charted your four-stop journey through the past—no DeLorean necessary.

The Great American Beer Festival is once again upon us, running from October 6 to 8 in downtown Denver. As you walk inside the Colorado Convention Center, pretzels draped around your neck, you might be awestruck and even overwhelmed by all the boozy options that await you—more than 3,500 brews, to be exact.

This month I started a new job. Survived a painful anniversary…and a robbery (not on the same day thankfully). Saved my cat (slight dramatization – but he was sick). Bought a car. Added a couple new writing outlets to my portfolio (Thrillist is below and stay tuned next month). Yeah, tough month.

Desierto, Mexico’s official submission as Best Foreign Language Film to the next Academy Awards, doesn’t seem a likely inspiration for Gravity, which won seven Oscars in 2014. But when young filmmaker Jonás Cuarón showed the first draft of the script to his father Alfonso nearly 10 years ago, the elder Cuarón said he wanted to make a movie like it — in space.

Growing up in the Great Plains, my only exposure to camping involved an RV. When I moved to Colorado in 2014, I didn’t have a closet full of old gear like the natives, and my family doesn’t do hand-me-down tents. All I had was a copy of Cheryl Strayed’s Wild and determination not to let my new location on the Front Range go to waste.

Alcohol delivery service Drizly launched in Denver in 2014, and since then it’s been gathering some fascinating data on our residents’ unique tastes in booze. It should come as no surprise that the 80202 zip code—which includes the central business district, LoDo, and Riverfront Park—is Denver’s “thirstiest” area, year-to-date, according to Drizly. But this downtown locale also tops out all zip codes serviced by the app, including ones in New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston, and Washington, D.C.

Speaking at the Democratic National Convention last week, the singer Demi Lovato took advantage of the powerful platform to advocate for mental health care in America. “Like millions of Americans, I am living with mental illness,” she said. “Too many Americans from all walks of life don’t get help, either because they fear the stigma or they cannot afford treatment.”

In every therapist’s or doctor’s office I’ve ever been in, one of the questions I am asked as part of my assessment is whether I have a significant other and how that person handles my depression. “That’s often one of the biggest stressors,” my doctor once said, congratulating me on not having a boyfriend. “Someone putting pressure on you to feel better.”

She didn’t mention the stress of knowing someone doesn’t believe you can feel better.